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Silver Spring Startup Gets $500K State Grant

09/30/2013

A Silver Spring company is the most recent recipient of a half-a-million-dollar grant from the state's InvestMaryland program.

The company—Weather Analytics, which started up just last year—received a $500,000 grant, according to a news release from the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. The company recently moved from Virginia to 8403 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring.

They get those measurements "from a worldwide network of more than 45,000 sensors, including ground stations, buoys, ships, aircraft and balloons." The company combines those measurements "with more than three decades of historical weather information to develop the company's proprietary indices and forecasts," according to the news release.

Why do they do this massive job in Maryland? "Maryland is a great and natural choice to base Weather Analytics," Pardue said in a statement. "The headquarters of the National Weather Service is in Montgomery County and the University of Maryland is building a terrific program in meteorology. We've just recruited two outstanding scientists from their graduate program," he said.

"In addition, many of our investors live in Maryland and the leadership of the Maryland Venture Fund in our recent [$2 million dollar] capital [fundraising campaign] is key to building our national and international expansion programs," he added.

Through InvestMaryland grants, the state-run Maryland Venture Fund invests in technology companies—like Weather Analytics—doing business in fields such as e-commerce, biotechnology, online education, social media, information technology and communications. According to the news release, the fund has been around for 17 years and has invested $25 million in more than 100 technology and life sciences companies in the early states of doing business.

The fund also has generated $67 million, 2,000 jobs and more than $1 billion in private investment, the release continued.

"InvestMaryland allows us to nurture Maryland's innovation economy by supporting startups like Weather Analytics, which help to strengthen Maryland's position as a hub for big data, IT, cybersecurity and the life sciences," Governor Martin O'Malley said in a statement.